The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Traditionally, devices are manually configured with user accounts and access control and security policies to allow or to deny access by users. When a user account is added or removed or when a change in the access control and security policies occurs, these devices need to be individually configured again. However, this traditional approach is time and labor intensive, especially for an organization that has thousands of devices that multiple users or entities require access to.
The development and deployment of internet of things (IoT) devices has proceeded with remarkable speed in the past several years. IoT devices are diverse, including everything from controllers of industrial equipment to smart watches and personal activity monitors. However, security infrastructure has not kept pace with the huge number and wide use of these devices. Some analysts estimate that billions of such devices will be operating and connected to internetworks within a few years, but there is presently no effective security architecture that can efficiently permit IoT devices to be secured effectively, yet readily usable. Key constraints in this technical field have included limited processing power, limited memory, and limited or absent user interface elements. All these characteristics of IoT devices make them difficult to integrate into existing client-server security systems. At the same time, misuse of IoT devices could be catastrophic by permitting an attacker or unauthorized user to gain control of industrial equipment or other systems that have embedded IoT devices.
Thus, there is a need for an improved and efficient approach to configure devices without human intervention at each of these devices. There is also a need for a secure method of storing, managing, and accessing user accounts and access control and security policies that is tolerant of security breaches.